Fantasy Hotels: Excess Is All

By Patricia Leigh Brown; Patricia Leigh Brown is a reporter for the Home section of The New York Times.

Published: October 21, 1990

EERIE RED lights and steam blasting from the tops of palm trees are the first signs that all is not tranquil amid the waterfalls and stylized rock formations that make up the $12 million frontispiece of the Mirage resort in Las Vegas, Nev.

Several thousand people, many juggling children and video cameras, have gathered around this ersatz geological wonder in the manner of tourists hovering around Old Faithful. They will not be disappointed. Soon, the four and a half acres of misty lagoons and grottoes - which have been lighted by David Hersey, lighting designer for ''Les Miserables'' and ''Starlight Express'' - will erupt against the Las Vegas night sky in angry columns of steam and flames, giving the appearance of a gigantic baked alaska.

The Mirage's ''volcanic entry experience,'' as Mr. Hersey calls it, is only one of many elements that qualify it for membership in a small and exclusive group of hotels that have make-believe as their guiding theme.

Often designed in a hyperbolic style that might be described as Synthe-Luxe or Pseudo Nouveau, these hotels naturally proliferate in Las Vegas, the Galapagos Islands for fantasy hotels in terms of sheer diversity of the species. But they also flourish in seemingly unlikely places. At the West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, Canada, is the Fantasyland Hotel and Resort where would-be big riggers can spend the night in a Truck Room, complete with working traffic lights and a bed set into a half-ton truck. Farther south, visitors to the Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo, Calif., can go to their rest in the Caveman, a room with solid rock floors, walls and ceilings (''If you like rocks, you'll love this room,'' says the Inn's postcard).

Though their themes vary, most fantasy hotels are designed to enable guests to indulge in what the New York-based hotel architect Alan Lapidus - the son of Morris Lapidus, architect of the Fontainebleau hotel - calls ''participatory theater.'' Some of them shamelessly borrow Hollywood imagery in order to let visitors act out specific fantasies. These hotels are decidedly otherworldly, ''reconstructing reality according to their own ideas of what reality should be,'' says Stephen A. Wynn, developer of the Mirage. In design, they tend to follow the hallowed precepts of the California casino designer Zoli Kovacs: ''Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.''

At the Mirage, which has 3,049 rooms and 18-karat gold-glazed windows, pink paths set into the floral carpet lead to several attractions, including Kokomo's, a restaurant-in-a-rain-forest. Another attraction is the Tiger Habitat, where rare white tigers pace beside a pool surrounded by white ogee arches. (The tigers also perform with the illusionists Siegfried and Roy in the hotel's Theater Mirage.) Beyond the lobby, which features two bare-breasted brass mermaids, visitors enter a 90-foot-high domed tropical conservatory, where fake greenery blends with real orchids. A footbridge winds throughout the conservatory, and tourists pose for photographs on the spot in front of a waterfall-fountain, which is rumored, as befits Las Vegas, to net thousands of dollars in ''wishes'' every month.

The Shangri-La effect is also evident in the hotel's casino, where the gaming tables are sheltered beneath carved faux-ivory ceilings and thatched roofs, but it does not penetrate the Salon Prive, the by-invitation-only high rollers baccarat sanctum hidden behind a golden door. The Mirage's pool, on the other hand, is pure Go-Go-Gauguin, augmented by fiberglass-reinforced concrete rock caves and islands that hold slides and waterfalls. In dry desert heat, the tropical ruse is abetted by an elaborate hidden misting system. A re-creation of Victoria Falls is planned. ''You don't create excitement by being a drone,'' explains Joel Bergman, the Mirage's architect.

Sadly, fantasy at the Mirage is mostly a public event; the only places where a conscious sense of make-believe and theater does not prevail are the cheerfully decorated but quite ordinary $129-a-night hotel rooms.

In Las Vegas, the recipe for artifice differs with each hotel. At the new 4,032-room Excalibur, a medieval castle for the masses owned by Circus Circus Enterprises, the ingredients include the following, as itemized in the promotional literature:

THE EXCALIBUR LOOMS OVER the Las Vegas Strip, looking for all the world like the evil twin of the Disney World Cinderella's Castle.

The hotel's moving sidewalk ascends from the Strip, carrying visitors upward; part of it is a drawbridge that passes over a moat. Before entering the lobby, guests go through a stone passageway decorated with crossed swords and heraldic banners. On a platform in the hotel's casino is an army of slot machines - here called ''Medieval Slot Fantasy'' machines - quatrefoil-decorated poker chairs and other oddities. An escalator whisks people from the casino to the second-floor Medieval Village - the apotheosis of Ye Olde.